by Jill Downie
Al couldn’t resist.
“Business or pleasure, sir?”
Raymond Morris had regained some of his composure, trying out his light laugh again.
“My only business with Lana is pleasure, and I hope we can keep that between these four walls. Douglas knows I gave Lana a lift while he had his meeting with Jim. Case closed?”
Al ignored the attempted witticism, and turned to Jim Landers, who had withdrawn behind the counter.
“You confirm this, sir? Did you have a meeting with the treasurer?”
“I can. Douglas and I talked budget, and had a drink.”
Al turned back to Raymond Morris, who made as if to leave the shop.
“Just before you go, sir, to answer your question. No, the case is far from closed, but what is going on between you and Mrs. Lorrimer is not my business. Not at the moment. All we need is a signed statement from both of you, and that we need between the four walls of Hospital Lane in the next few hours. Okay?”
“Perfect! Will do! Thank you!”
A set of impossibly white teeth gleamed beneath the pencil-thin moustache, the bell jingled and, with a whirling gesture of farewell, Raymond Morris was gone. Behind the bulwark of his counter, Jim Landers was picking up his duster, his face averted. Al Brown held out his purchase.
“Glad you had this.” Was it possible, he wondered, to shake that sense of calm withdrawal about this man? Worth a try. “Did you know, Mr. Landers, that you were acting as a kind of a decoy for Mr. Morris?”
Jim Landers looked up from his duster.
“As you yourself said, Sergeant, what is going on between those two is none of my business. I’ll be at the station after the shop closes. My assistant cannot be here today. Enjoy your Amis. Good day.”
Constable McMullin had a sheaf of papers in his hand and a tentative look on his face, a face so young and unmarked it seemed to Moretti to be a tabula rasa for a life yet to be lived. Even his hair had not yet decided what colour it was going to be when it grew up.
“It’s unbelievable, sir, seemed at first like a real stroke of bad luck.”
“Tell me about it.”
“In the seventies, when the university was changing over from paper records and putting everything onto the computer, there was a massive screw-up. Dozens, possibly hundreds — they’re not sure — of student names from the late fifties and into the sixties were either missed or erased, and the paperwork destroyed before the error was found. They made an effort to track down as many as possible, through newsletters and so on, but they still have many missing. They have no record of a Lucy Gastineau, which means nothing, but they do have an Augustus Dorey. He was there, studying history, between 1949 and 1953, graduating with an Upper Second. But not in history. He changed courses and ended up with a law degree.”
“So our hermit was probably a lawyer. That should make it easier to trace his career. Anything else?”
“That was about it, but then I thought about clubs.”
“Clubs as in stamp collecting, sports?”
“Yes.” PC McMullin rustled through his papers and pulled one out. “I thought, people at colleges and things join clubs a lot, don’t they, so I asked about club records. Some keep good records, depending on how keen the president and the treasurer and so on were, because sometimes they kept in touch afterwards. Gus Dorey was a member of the Debating Society, and they gave me the name of a couple of members from the time he was there. Of course, they’d be pretty old now.”
“Seventies, yes, or more. Go on.”
“Well, then it was something the admissions lady said. She said it might be worth trying the Drama Department. They had good records of past productions and that kind of thing. It was important history for them, because Bristol was the first university to open a Drama Department and offer it as a degree course. She said there were all kinds of pictures and photos in the archive. And I got on to this really helpful lady, who did some checking around the same years Gus Dorey was there.” PC McMullin gave a little laugh. “She’s a bit of a mystery buff and she said it was like looking into a missing persons file. Like a cold case, and she just kept at it. That’s why I took so long.”
“You haven’t taken long, Constable.” Moretti could feel his heartbeat accelerate as he saw footprints on the track ahead of him. “PC Perkins is still out riding the buses. Tell me you found her.”
“I found her.” PC McMullin was beaming now. “Well, we found her, and she’s even emailed me a photo.”
Liz Falla walked into Moretti’s office to the sound of laughter. Her Guvnor looked up as she came in, and gestured towards Police Constable McMullin like a ringmaster introducing a brand new act.
“Come on in, Falla, and see what McMullin has dug up from the mists of time.”
Liz walked over to the desk and looked down at a faded photograph, downloaded from an email attachment. Two men and one woman in what looked mediaeval costume stood in a semi-circle. The woman appeared to be addressing the men, and she was laughing as she did so. A very young woman, almost as tall as the men, slender, laughing. In the faded black-and-white photo, her long hair, which was coiled up in a braid around her head, looked dark black against the whiteness of her skin.
“There she is, Falla, rehearsing in Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not For Burning. Someone, God bless them, has written all three names and the name of the play beneath the photo. ”
“Lucy?” Liz ran around the desk to join them, just as Al Brown came into the office.
“Lucy Gastineau. Gus Dorey’s darling.”
Chapter Twenty-One
“He’s got that.”
Al Brown gestured towards the play title written under the image. “Funny how I speak of him in the present, but to me he’s very much alive, since I’ve been living with his library the past few days. I’ll go down to storage and take a look through again to see if there’s anything of interest. There were so many books I ended up just giving each one a shake for loose papers.”
Moretti looked at Falla, and then turned his attention to a still-beaming PC McMullin.
“Well done, Constable. And now I’m going to ask you to do something difficult.” McMullin sat forward in his chair. “You are not going to say a single word about your triumph. Delete the email from the computer you used, and keep your mouth shut. No bragging. If the name Lucy Gastineau in conjunction with Bristol University and Gus Dorey gets outside this room, I’ll know how.”
“Yes, sir.” McMullin stood up, clearly disappointed. “Will there be anything else?”
“I’ll let you know.”
Taking a last look at the photograph as he turned to leave the room, PC McMullin said, “I used to do some acting at school. I really liked it, especially the musicals. Only chorus, but … ”
“Did you now? Sit down, Constable.”
Moretti was looking at the photo as he spoke, and when he looked up it was at Liz Falla.
“Can you ask your aunt to get PC McMullin into the play, Falla?”
“Ask, Guv?” Liz smiled at the startled constable, who had returned to his seat. “They’d jump at the chance. Always short of men they are.”
McMullin was now looking as if he’d just made a killing on the football pools.
“I’d be your mole, sir?”
“Got it in one, Constable. DS Falla will let you know as soon as she hears it’s a go.”
“Do I pretend not to be on the force, sir?”
“Absolutely not. Keep the acting onstage. You will be exactly who you are, a stage-struck copper called — Bob, isn’t it?”
“Yessir!”
Moretti waited until the Island Players newest thespian had left the room, then turned back to Falla.
“He used his initiative about the Bristol enquiries, thought for himself, so it’s worth a try. When you brief him, Falla, talk to him about Charles Priestley. He’s not that much older than the golden boy, and might be able to strike up some sort of friendship with him. But stress the fa
ct that he’s there to observe, and to listen, not to ask leading questions. I don’t want PC McMullin ending up like Shawcross. He might not be so lucky.”
Moretti looked at Al. “So how did you get along with the man of few words at WORDS?”
Al Brown grinned. “I’ll start off with the juicy stuff, shall I? Jim Landers’s alibi is the treasurer, Douglas Lorrimer, and the director’s alibi is the treasurer’s wife.”
Al Brown filled in the details, interrupted only by the tapping sound of Moretti’s pen against the black-and-white photo on the desk.
“So there’s hanky-panky. Par for the course, I’d say, and probably nothing to do with anything relevant to the case. Falla, I’m sending you to interview Lana Lorrimer, and to handle it with your usual tact and delicacy. In other words, play it by ear.”
“I’ll try girls-together first, see what happens, Guv.”
“And now let’s talk about Meg the gypsy.”
“And Billie the Bus Bum?” Al asked. Moretti nodded.
“Billie knows everything about the island’s gypsies — and I don’t mean the Roma, but the roamers, because he’s one himself. But, unlike Meg, Billie has a set pattern, taking a specific route one day, and another the next. Meg drifts, but if anyone knows where she is at the moment, Billie will.”
Moretti got up and crossed to the window. No foghorns today, but a light rain was beginning to fall, and he would probably hear them during the night. Music drifted into his mind, nothing unusual about that. Someone to watch over me. His back was towards the room as he started to speak.
“My mother knew Meg the gypsy. Margie, she called her. But she only knew her after the war, when she was involved in some children’s welfare outfit. Margie needed help of all kinds, and resisted most. She ran away from home and was taken back, only to run away again. She usually turned up around the Pleinmont Common area, and her home was on the road that runs behind the Imperial Hotel. At that time, it was a farm, with outhouses and some greenhouses, and was falling to bits. Her father was a drunkard, and her mother kept the family’s income going by sleeping with the enemy. Or so they said. I’m a bit vague over the details, but both parents died when Meg was in her late teens, which would be around about the mid-fifties, and left Meg a property owner. She lived in squalor in the place, visited from time to time by social services. Then, when the island started to make money with money, the property became valuable, and parts of it were sold off, including the eighteenth-century farmhouse.”
Moretti came back into the room and sat down again.
“I remember my mother saying to my father, ‘How did little Margie do it?’ And I think we now know how. Gus Dorey the lawyer did it, set it all up for her. I’ll put Bernie Mauger on to that. I’ve got him checking out Hugo Shawcross at the moment.”
“That would be when Dorey came back in the nineties?” Al interjected.
“Couldn’t have been. Had to be earlier than that. My mother died in the early eighties.”
It was Moretti who broke the silence that followed.
“So there was contact between Meg the gypsy and Gus the hermit before he built his roundhouse. We already knew that from what she told Al about being rescued from the tower, but that must have been before he went away to university. There seems to have been another, quite lengthy period of contact, if it involved setting up the farm sale, and Meg kept quiet about that. And there would have been a bond between them. Both had a parent who consorted with the enemy.”
Moretti stood up, stretching his arms above his head.
“I don’t know about the two of you, but I’m more than ready for a very late lunch. Then, Al, I want you to visit Doug Lorrimer, and check out both his and Jim Landers’s alibi.”
Liz picked up her jacket and slung her small purse across her shoulders. The expression in her eyes took Moretti by surprise, and disconcerted him. Not humour, or anger, or even that insouciance with which his partner so often handled life’s difficult moments. It looked uncomfortably like tenderness.
But all she said was, “What will you be doing, Guv?”
Relieved, he replied, “Later I’m going to talk to someone from the Guernsey Press, but right now, Falla, I am going to look for a little lamb who’s lost in the wood.”
Moretti took the Triumph for this trip, because he was sure to get parking near the Imperial Hotel at this time of the year, after the departure of the summer visitors. The light rain had stopped, the morning mist had lifted, and the sky was clearing as he drove out to the southwest coast of the island.
He parked the car by the curved sea wall opposite the hundred-year-old hotel, got out, and felt the sea air against his face, filling his lungs with its freshness and lifting his spirits. He took a moment to look out over the curve of coastline stretching towards Rocquaine Bay, the occasional wayward wave hitting his face. The tide was high, the water slapping against the wall, and in the distance a shaft of sunlight caught the bright white cylindrical top of Fort Grey on its promontory. Originally known as the Château de Rocquaine, and now called the cup and saucer by the locals, not all of the site’s incarnations had been military. According to one island history, it had in the past been associated with “the unholy revels of the witches.”
Unholy revels. Meg the gypsy had, in the past, run into some unpleasantness with creeps who branded her a witch for their own amusement, but the intimations of unholy revels in this case had nothing to do with her, and everything to do with someone in the Island Players’ coterie.
Moretti reluctantly turned away from the sea and the shore and started up the hill beside the hotel. To his left was a terrace of houses and beyond them more homes scattered along the coastline. To his right, the road was bordered with thick undergrowth, hedges and trees, and not far to the south was Pleinmont Common, much of it now owned by the Société Guernesiaise, and maintained as the island’s largest nature reserve. When Meg the gypsy wandered from her home to return to the place where she had found happiness, she was unlikely to run into too many people, particularly at night, even in the height of the season.
But that was only when she was at the farm and, from her conversation with Al at the roundhouse, Moretti had the feeling she was aware of the danger to her of “the other one.” Like most wild creatures, she had a well-developed sixth sense, and a strong instinct for self-preservation. Al Brown could attest to that.
“Farm” was an inaccurate description of the collection of buildings that came into view around the next corner. To the left of a wide, curving driveway between four-foot high white-painted brick walls stood the original farmhouse, its ancient stone walls lovingly preserved, but other than that, very few changes had been made to the exterior. To the right of the driveway stood a building that must have once served as the barn for the livestock, or as a place of storage for crops. Around this solid brick structure, the wall rose abruptly to about six feet in height, with a set of steps leading down to the lower level. Moretti walked around the outside of the building, which had no windows facing the road.
“Can I help you?”
At the bottom of the driveway stood a woman holding on to the collar of a large dog of uncertain breed, but of far from uncertain ill-humour. As Moretti turned back and made as if to move toward them, it showed an impressive set of teeth and growled, deep in its ample throat. Moretti stood still and slowly removed his police badge from his pocket.
“Detective Inspector Moretti. I wanted to either have a few words with Meg or speak to someone about her. It might affect her safety.”
“You’re here about Meg. Eduardo, right? Relax, Darcy.”
Darcy relaxed, thumping heavily to the ground by his mistress’s feet with a groan, as if the effort to be ferocious had exhausted him.
“You know me?” No surprise on this island, but the woman’s use of his Italian name was. He couldn’t quite place her accent. English, yes, sounds of a privileged upbringing in it, but there was something different in the lilt, a softening of the “t” w
hen she said “about” and “right.”
“I know your mother’s old friend, Gwen. She lives not very far from here.”
“Of course. But she always calls me Edward.”
“Nonetheless, I know the story.”
Darcy’s owner was above average height, and looked to be in her sixties, although Moretti found judging age more difficult the older he got, for some reason. Her salt and pepper hair surrounded a strong-featured face and a pair of sharp blue eyes behind heavy-framed glasses. She was dressed in loose garments that flowed around her and looked handwoven rather than mass-produced, and something about them reminded Moretti of Al’s description of Meg’s clothing. Around her neck was a heavy silver chain with a chunk of amber hanging from it the size of a hen’s egg. She too was wearing heavy boots, unlaced, as if she had pulled them on when seeing him outside.
“I think you’d better come in. I haven’t seen Meg for a day or two. Not too unusual before. But now that Gus Dorey is gone, a bit worrying.”
As he followed her, Moretti looked around the yard. There was nothing much in it, no decorative display of plants in pots, or flowerbeds. A tractor was parked at the far end of the property.
“Is this still a working farm?” Moretti indicated the tractor.
“No, hasn’t been for years. I let Roland Le Tissier park that back there. He’s sold off so much land he’s not much room left, and he clings to that tractor as if maybe one day the greenhouses will rise again.”
“Not likely.”
She didn’t respond, but opened the door and let him and Darcy inside.
Moretti walked into a large high-ceilinged room, in the centre of which was a loom, surrounded by baskets of wool, giant skeins of all colours. A half-finished piece hung suspended on the loom in colours of the autumn, golds, browns, some red. There was the smell of sandalwood in the air, and alongside the loom was a round table with sticks of incense burning in a brass censor. The working area was brightly lit by two standard lamps of industrial rather than ornamental design.
